Joan thought. “It’s curious,” she said, “one so seldom hears of anybody being born on Christmas Day.” One day Joan, lunching at the club, met Madge Singleton.!

“But do not all our Isms work towards that end?” suggested Madge. “Oh, I’m not afraid,” he answered. “I’ll get another place all right: give me time. The only thing I’m worried about is my young woman.”

“What about the other people irritating us?” suggested Joan. “Are you, too, a Christian?” he asked of Joan. Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not, perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton’s great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings. The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches, still capped its grim iron railings.